Robert F. Kennedy Jr Tells His Life Story (Full Interview)

Summary

Highlights

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shares tales from his illustrious family, including his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and uncle, President John F. Kennedy. 🏛️
• He discusses growing up under the shadow of his family's significant political legacy and public expectations. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
• Kennedy opens up about his challenges with addiction and how it shaped his life, leading to sobriety. 🚀
• He is passionate about combating pollution, seeing it as a form of theft from the public. ⚖️
• His recent move to run as an independent for the presidency marks a significant step in his public service aspirations. 🚀

Key Takeaways

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is part of the legendary Kennedy family, known for its profound impact on U.S. politics. 🌟
• He grew up immersed in a world of privilege but faced family tragedies that shaped his perspectives. 💔
• Kennedy debunked long-standing rumors about his family's alleged mafia connections. 🚫
• A life marked by personal struggles, including addiction, demonstrates his resilience in overcoming adversity. 💪
• He has been a fierce advocate for environmental protection, leading significant legal battles against pollution. 🌍
• Recently, he announced his candidacy for U.S. President as an independent, focusing on transparency and change. 🗳️

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Family Background The chapter introduces Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a presidential candidate and member of the famous Kennedy family. He is the son of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy. The interview begins with a focus on his family's prominent history, even before his birth, highlighting his connection to the well-known political and influential Kennedy lineage, beginning with his grandfather, Joseph Kennedy.
• 01:00 - 05:00: Robert's Early Life and Family Memories The chapter discusses Robert's early life and his famous family, focusing on his notable children: John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States; Ted Kennedy, a longtime Senator; and Robert F. Kennedy, also known as Bobby Kennedy, who served as Attorney General and Senator. It also touches on the closeness of the family, emphasizing strong family ties and memories from that time.
• 05:00 - 09:00: Joseph Kennedy and Rumors of Bootlegging The chapter is titled 'Joseph Kennedy and Rumors of Bootlegging' and opens with a discussion about a significant historical figure, presumably Joseph Kennedy. It recounts the tragic loss in the family with two of Kennedy's children dying during World War II. One of them, Joe, is highlighted for his courageous act, volunteering for a very dangerous mission after completing his service as a pilot in England. This mission involved flying on what was essentially a suicide mission, further elaborating on the family's sacrifice and contributions during the war.
• 19:00 - 34:00: Assassination of John F. Kennedy The chapter discusses a plot in which a controlled airplane, repurposed as a flying bomb, was intended to be used against Nazi submarine pens in Scandinavia. The operator's task was to launch the plane, reach a specified altitude, and carry out the mission to target the submarine facilities.
• 34:00 - 45:00: Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy The chapter titled 'Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy' discusses the circumstances surrounding his assassination. It reveals a plot where a companion plane, flying next to Kennedy's, would take over the controls via remote control. The plan was for Kennedy to parachute out once the remote was activated. However, the activation triggered bombs on his plane, causing it to disintegrate instantly. As a result, Kennedy was not found and was presumed dead during the war. The chapter also mentions the death of the narrator's Aunt K in an airplane crash immediately after the war, leaving behind seven children.
• 45:00 - 56:00: Impact of Family Tragedies The chapter details the profound impact of various family tragedies on the Kennedy family, focusing particularly on their experiences in Hyannisport. The narrator talks about their grandfather purchasing a house in Hyannisport in 1928, highlighting his prominence as a successful banker and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The grandfather's vast wealth is noted, being one of the few millionaires during the Great Depression and having significant investments in Hollywood, including being the CEO of a major movie studio. This context sets the stage for understanding the family's lifestyle and the eventual personal tragedies that affected them.
• 56:00 - 65:00: Education and Overcoming Challenges The chapter titled 'Education and Overcoming Challenges' discusses a large family, referred to as the Kennedy Compound, consisting of nine children raised by the owner who originally purchased the first house in the area. The narrative focuses on one of the younger members of this family, who was among the first to marry and had 11 children, 10 of whom are siblings of the narrator. Unfortunately, two of these siblings have passed away.
• 65:00 - 82:00: Environmental Activism The chapter titled 'Environmental Activism' begins with a personal anecdote about the narrator’s childhood. The narrator shares memories of spending time with their grandfather, who took them horseback riding and boating on a vessel named the Marlin, which was a cabin cruiser. These experiences appear to have been family traditions, as many family members owned boats. Despite this, the narrator shares that spending time with their grandfather, including weekly dinners, was a cherished routine. This fond personal history sets the stage for further exploration of themes related to family, nature, and possibly how these experiences influenced the narrator's involvement in environmental activism.
• 82:00 - 95:00: Meeting Fidel Castro and Environmental Initiatives This chapter discusses the author's family connections with prominent political figures. It starts with a mention of the author's grandfather who was associated with the SEC and had substantial wealth. The narrative also touches on the author's grandmother, Rose Kennedy, and her lineage, highlighting her father's role as a political operative and ward boss for the Democratic Party in Boston. Additionally, it notes the author's other great-grandfather, Honey Fitz, who holds the distinction of being the first Irish Catholic mayor. The chapter weaves these familial highlights to possibly lead into a broader discussion on the author's interactions with Fidel Castro and his own environmental initiatives.
• 95:00 - 108:30: Political Involvement and Presidential Run The chapter discusses a significant building in America, noted for its size. The Merchandise Mart in Chicago is highlighted, second only to the Pentagon in size. Additionally, the chapter dispels a rumor regarding involvement in liquor bootlegging. It clarifies that any involvement in the liquor business was legitimate, occurring only after laws permitted it.
• 108:30 - 97:00: Conclusion and Reflections The chapter discusses the unpopularity of prohibition, especially among the Irish and in urban areas, contrasting with its rural support. It mentions the speaker's grandfather, who held significant positions, including as head of the SEC, during his career.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr Tells His Life Story (Full Interview) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 all right here we go today we have presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr son of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy nephew of President John F Kennedy welcome to Vlad TV Vlad thanks for having me absolutely well you have a a very long history that actually starts before you were born so I want to get into all that before we begin and tell your story so you're a part of the legendary Kennedy family uh and your grandfather is Joseph Kennedy yes and uh
• 00:30 - 01:00 he had some pretty famous kids he had uh John F Kennedy who was the 35th President of the United States uh longtime Senator Ted Kennedy and attorney general and Senator Robert F Kennedy AKA Bobby Kennedy who is your father so do you have any uh memory of your grandfather growing up yeah um you know all of us were very close my the family was very close-knit so my
• 01:00 - 01:30 grandfather had nine kids he how two of the kids died during World War II and one immediately after um Joe my Uncle Joe was killed on he did a he volunteered for what essentially was a suicide mission he had completed all of his um he he was on his way home he had been a pilot uh out of England uh flying over Germany and over the channel and he had volunteered for a a mission to fly the first remote
• 01:30 - 02:00 controlled airplane which they had turned into a flying bomb and they were going to act they he he had to take it off and then they were going to um they were going to send it into the submarine pens off of uh off of Scandinavia to the Nazi submarine pens and he had turn his job was to turn to take it off get it at altitude then a
• 02:00 - 02:30 um another plane that was flying next to him the the companion plane would turn on the remote control and take over the controls of the plane and he was supposed to uh parachute out as soon as they turned it on it sparked the bombs in it and it and his it disintegrated the plane immediately and he was not found he died during the war my aunt K died immediately after the war in an airplane crash the seven kids that were
• 02:30 - 03:00 left um were all around hyannisport so my my grandfather bought a house in hyannisport in 1928 he had been the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission he had been one of 10 millionaires in this country during the Great Depression he was a banker uh he owned a movie St studio in in one of the biggest movie studios in um in Hollywood or he was the CEO of it and the biggest
• 03:00 - 03:30 owner and then he um and he had as I said nine kids um he raised them they all had hous around to his house so that was what it's called the Kennedy Compound my father bought the first of those houses my father was uh was one of the younger kids that was the first to get married he had 11 kids so I have I have 10 siblings two of whom have died um
• 03:30 - 04:00 and uh I grew up with my grandfather my grandfather took us horseback riding every day I went out on and he had a boat um called the Marlin it's a cabin cruiser and we went we went on one we we went on some boats every day so a lot of the family had boats and um but a lot of us went with my grandfather every day and uh and so I you know I we had dinner with them at least one night a week
• 04:00 - 04:30 with him and my grandmother Rose Kennedy incidentally his father was a um was a political operative he was a ward boss for the Democratic party and Boston my grand my other great-grandfather Rose Kennedy's father was honey Fitz who was the first Irish Catholic mayor boss Okay and like you mentioned your grandfather was extremely wealthy you know the first president of the SEC uh he also owned this huge
• 04:30 - 05:00 building was like the biggest building in America yeah own the biggest building other than the Pentagon the merchandise Martin and Chicago now I just want to address this rumor because from what I understand it's not true but there was always the rumor that he was involved in liquor bootlegging and liquor bootle yeah he was not right from what I understand from what I read that he actually did start to import export liquor after it became legal so he wasn't actually doing it when it was illegal during the whole kind of the the Criminal part uh when they you know the
• 05:00 - 05:30 way that prohibition ended prohibition was very unpopular among the Irish particularly right and in urban populations it was really it was a rural impulse and not you know in the urban populations uh it was extremely unpopular so um uh but my grandfather you know but and by the way my grandfather would went through three Presidential appointments including the head of the SEC and um and
• 05:30 - 06:00 he had a high job up in the ship building for the United States Navy and he had um and he was the ambassador to uh the court of St James England he had to go through Senate hearings in each one if he had had anything to do with the liquor industry or with prohibition he had so many political enemies and that would have come out yeah um he uh but the way the prohibition ended is you had to have I think you had 20 uh 26 States
• 06:00 - 06:30 had to uh uh had to disavow Prohibition in order in order the to hold to the Constitution yeah so when it got close to those 23 or 26 they knew it was coming so he went over to Scotland and he bought pinch vodka or pinch whiskey which one of the Premier whiskey companies mhm he did it with James Roosevelt who is the President's son okay the two of them
• 06:30 - 07:00 bought it and then they they imported to Canada I don't know how much but a lot of this stuff so it was at warehouses right next to the US border so the second that prohibition ended all the lqu came now he was never accused of being a booth leer until after he had his stroke and couldn't defend himself and my uncle was killed uhhuh it was 1964 and there was a um and the the at
• 07:00 - 07:30 that point the CIA was um was uh trying to um let's say disparage the rumors that they may have had something to do with President Kennedy's assassination there was a big effort that was run by an individual in the CIA who had been the New York Times bureau chief in aan and he his job for the next 30 years was blackening the Kennedy name and that
• 07:30 - 08:00 is one of the rumors that he started at that time and it was in order to promote the story that my my uncle had been killed by the mafia because he had double crossed them because the Jan K mob had helped him win Chicago and then my father had prosecuted Sam Gan and put 600 people in jail from that mob and from you know the
• 08:00 - 08:30 traic and Carlos Marcelo organizations and that this was their Revenge so this is a nonsense story that makes no sense in fact when I was a little kid when in 19 uh uh 59 I went to and there's pictures of me sitting in the Senate hearing room on my mother's lap in the front row my father um eviscerated Sam Jan con so Sam Jan Khan I think took the fifth um 50
• 08:30 - 09:00 times in front of my father my father ridiculed them my father asked him are you you know do you hang people from who who who cross you from meat hooks have you done that he giggled and um my father said you're giggling like a little girl aren't you like a little girl so samj and Conor did not like my father now what people are saying is 6 months after that hearing somehow my father was my uncles was Jack Kennedy's
• 09:00 - 09:30 campaign manager somehow my father then cuts a deal with Sam Gan Conor who he ridiculed who he's putting in jail who he's attacked for years and they make up and Sam Gan Conor gives my uncle the White House it doesn't make any sense right not only that but my you know that people accuse my you know one of the kind of another rumor that was circulating at the time was that my uncle won the presidency I uh conniving with mayor
• 09:30 - 10:00 Daly to fix the Cal the Chicago vote well may da fixed a Chicago vote for the lower ballot candidates all the time so nobody disagrees with that the problem with this is that after that vote first of all after the vote mayor Dy was so outraged about that these accusations that my uncle had won unfairly that he offered to do a recount
• 10:00 - 10:30 and pay for it himself he also even if my uncle had lost Illinois he would have still won the President's say so um it is what it is it is what it is right because the rumor was always and even when I interview Mafia guys like Michael frenes it was like okay so the grandfather was The Bootlegger who worked with the mafia and the mafia helped John F Kennedy become president and then when Bobby went after the mafia they felt betrayed so they you know killed John F Kennedy and and so forth
• 10:30 - 11:00 yeah and you've heard this a million times I've heard it a million times everybody who's and there's a lot of writers out there who would have liked to find some evidence there's a guy called David Horwitz who spent years looking for that evidence and finally said yeah there it's not there it didn't happen you know my uncle had nothing to do with M my uncle at that you know right out of high school he became the youngest Bank president of the country he wasn't bootlegging he was he had a very visible life with with eyeballs on him all I
• 11:00 - 11:30 mean my grandfather all the time and then he went right into politics so you know if he had been been he had a lot of enemies on wall of Street all over the country if he had been a bootlegger at any point in his life that would have been found out at the time and would have been used against him a million times and it just there's no place in his life his life is very well known and there's no place in his life that that could have happen Okay so like you mentioned you were the third of 11 kids to Robert F
• 11:30 - 12:00 Kennedy so you're growing up in this you know very privileged you know uh wealthy family and when you were six years old your uncle John F Kennedy becomes the 35th president Hi John Fitzgerald Kennedy who follow me S you will Faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and I will Faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will to the best of your ability and will to the best of my ability preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the
• 12:00 - 12:30 United States preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States so help you God so help me God I mean you're pretty young but do you remember the Elation of your family that someone in your family Su pres I remember everything about the campaign you know I came out here for the convention it was the first time I've stayed up all night you know there's pictures of me at the convention here in Los Angeles I I they my dad took us to Northern California
• 12:30 - 13:00 for two days and I caught a snake up there and I kept that snake in my pocket so I had him at the convention and we had one of the boxes and I was playing with them and there's a lot of pictures of me doing that but I you know I remember we were staying at the hurst's house and you know William Randolph Hurst house when we were out here and I remember that I remember the fountain outside and I remember when my uh when my uncle got you know I was in the hall
• 13:00 - 13:30 when my uncle was n was uh was nominated as the candidate and I watched his speech and you know um my me and my siblings were running around the hall uh collecting buttons and that kind of stuff but you know we had been involved in the campaign to we were very very much aware my parents were always very good about including us and everything and telling us what they're doing and telling us about the importance in history and you know so that was just part of the milu growing up okay so John
• 13:30 - 14:00 F kenned becomes president and as soon as he becomes president he appoints his younger brother Bobby as us attorney general your dad yes so as soon as your dad becomes attorney general he starts this war against organized crime yeah he had already started the war before that yeah because my uncle had been on that Rockets Committee in the United States Senate he had been in the Senate before he came to before became president and my father was chief
• 14:00 - 14:30 counsil of the rackets committee so my father had you know his big issue and it was unusual for Democrats at that time it was like a daring move for Democrats because organized crime had infiltrated organized labor and particularly the Teamsters Union but some of the other unions if you were a Democrat you had Ambitions to run for president you needed the unions so you know people would warn my father and my uncle don't go after the unions because you're going to you you
• 14:30 - 15:00 need them to win yeah and they did it anyway but my father really felt that it was the he at that time he felt like it was the gravest threat to American democracy because the mafia had infiltrated all of these institutions that were part of key to our democracy including the labor unions but also the Judiciary they controlled a lot of Judges they they owned a lot of Congress people and he felt like it was a threat to democracy and ultimately the
• 15:00 - 15:30 Republic well yeah I mean at the time the FBI director J G Hoover he said the mafia doesn't exist yeah and that was based on the rumor that he was gay and they had pictures of him crossdressing so there was a little bit of a leverage situation he also had you know Hoover had also relationships with some of the mobsters and particularly Mickey Cohen who was the chief mobster here in Los Angeles and Hoover and his his
• 15:30 - 16:00 partner um would come out by partner I mean his uh you know romantic partner Clive Tolson would come out here to bet on the horse races and they would were given you know vouchers by by Cohen so and this is pretty well documented um and so that you know there were other reasons that he may want not wanted to have exposed the mafia but but there were individual
• 16:00 - 16:30 police um uh captains and commanders in the city police including here in Los Angeles who knew the mafia existed who were uh who were had active organized crime units in New York City in New Orleans and in California and they were all doing they were the only people in the country who were investigating organized crime my father became close to those guys okay so your dad is going
• 16:30 - 17:00 after the mafia and he actually called it his quote was basically there's a private government of organized crime with an annual income of billions resting on a base of human suffering and moral corrosion and during his time organized crime figures convictions Rose by 800% so he was putting a lot of people in prison and he went after haa he had something called the get haa Squad and him and hafa were almost like mortal enemies hafa even said there was a blood feud between him and your dad
• 17:00 - 17:30 yeah and haa eventually ended up going to prison and haa hired people to kill my father really yeah he hired a guy to shoot him in the swimming pool cuz my father swam every morning and he hired an and to firebomb our house uh to kill our whole family and when I was a kid our house was in a remote part of at that time a very remote part of Virginia which was on mlan it was before they
• 17:30 - 18:00 built a highway Dolly Madison Highway so it was a place where truck trucks would never come out there a diesel truck 18-wheeler but when we were our our house was a a very large property like six acres but it was surrounded by roads and almost a square of roads and those roads all day long there would be um there would be trucks going around our place blowing in their horns from the teamsters Union my the
• 18:00 - 18:30 Teamsters Union offices were right next to the justice department my father famously left the justice department at 10:00 one night and was driving past the Teamster Union office and he looked up at hot there was still lights on in H's office so he went back to the office and worked went back to work because he didn't want to be outworked by H so he did have a personal blood Feud with them I would say and uh you know they did arrest this one of the guys came forward who is part of this
• 18:30 - 19:00 murder um plot to kill my father and confessed everything wow well gladly nothing happened at that point okay and then November 22nd 1963 your uncle John F Kennedy gets assassinated yeah when you first found out how'd you react I was picked up at s s w friend school and we saw the um the flags were uh being lowered to half Mass my mother picked us up and she said
• 19:00 - 19:30 a Batman kill has shot um Uncle Jack and I went home you know I was got home probably 15 minutes later my father was walking in the yard with um John mccom who is the head of the CIA the CIA was only uh maybe 3/4 a mile from my house probably last a half mile from my house so my we used toide ride horses every day through the CIA campus
• 19:30 - 20:00 it was when the the you know the building was first being constructed and then afterward my father would spend time there every day because of the Cub issue and he and mome was one of the first people to arrive at the house and my father asked mcom during that conversation did the CIA do this to my brother and mcom who wouldn't have known anyway you know my father and uncle had fired Allan Dulles after the Bay of Pigs and they brought in mccom who was a
• 20:00 - 20:30 Straight Arrow he was a republican Catholic businessman and they wanted to straight out the agency but of course he never he really didn't know what was happening at the agency and Tas was still running a lot of things um so he my father asked him my father actually made three calls that two calls that day in addition ask him to come he called a friend of his who was one of the leaders of the Cuban Brigade a guy called which had you know
• 20:30 - 21:00 was a bay pigs Brigade yeah called Harry Ruiz who was a perennial figure around my house he was in a hotel in Washington he asked him did your people do this did the Cubans do this the CIA Cubans then he called the a desk officer at the CIA and asked them the same thing oh that was my father's National impulse when I got home I went down with my brother uh Joe and me we all got home at once and David and we went down and
• 21:00 - 21:30 you know hugged my father and we stood at the bottom of the hill at Hickory Hill where we you know our house was at the top of a long grassy Hill and there was a tree at the bottom of it and we all just stood there for a long time my father was just totally shattered yeah well Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder but before he can go to trial he got killed by Jack Ruby yeah I mean and this has been a conspiracy you know for decades at this point based on what you know as being part of the
• 21:30 - 22:00 Kennedy family was it just Lee Harvey Oswald was it multiple people what do you think actually happened well first of all you know when I was standing in the White House in the East room of the White House next to my uncle's casket when President Johnson came in and told my mother and my Aunt Jackie and my dad who were all standing next to me that a man named Jack Ruby had killed Lee Harvey oswal and I said to my mom at that
• 22:00 - 22:30 time I said why did he do that did he love our family because it made no sense to me why would you kill somebody and you know it didn't make any sense to anybody why would you go in broad daylight to the police station and risk your life you know um and he later said that he uh he did it to spare Jackie uh the the anguish of a long trial well he had never said anything nice about Jackie
• 22:30 - 23:00 and his wife he worked for the mafia he he ran a strip club that that had what they call be girls which were girls that would change you know every two weeks or months and a new group would be brought in and those girls went were went to these bee clubs all over the country all over the southwest and they were part of a you know stable um that was part of Carlos marcelo's organization Carlos Marcelo was New Orleans mob boss who also Dallas
• 23:00 - 23:30 was in his district and he was deeply involved in Cuba you know him Santos traficante Sam Gian con and Carlos Marcel all had a casinos in Havana that cash had shut down so they were all tied in with the cia's efforts to to kill Castro and that's how they all got involved now you ask me what I think happened I mean I you know the the
• 23:30 - 24:00 Warren Commission said that Lee Harvey oswal was a lone shooter and nothing about Lee Harvey oswal's W life or the evidence that there was so much evidence even at that time when we when it was just a tip the iceberg that that could not have possibly been true but then in 1979 Congress spent a a year and a half a congressional committee the house of elect assassinations Committee in fact
• 24:00 - 24:30 two congressional committees um spent a year and a half investigating and they had a lot more documents and a lot more witnesses than the Warren Commission had and they came to the conclusion that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy the lead investigator was a guy called Bob Bob Blakey and Bob Blakeley is now a professor law professor he belied that um it was more likely the mafia this is before they knew that the mafia and the CIA had murder Ed um but he believed that the that it
• 24:30 - 25:00 was more likely the mafia almost everybody on his staff and the the senator who actually started the investigation uh a a senator called schweer all believed that the CIA was the um was the uh uh principal culprit and but the the conclusion the official conclusion in the Congressional Record record was that John F Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy Blakey has
• 25:00 - 25:30 since changed his opinion and Blakey now believes that the CIA was involved because so much other um but they I would say there's so much evidence that it is the that of CIA involvement not only with my uncle's murder but then with the you know the 60-year cover up we there's including probably 20 confessions of people who were involved a lot of them were deathbed confessions but you know key figures like David Morales like d David Atley
• 25:30 - 26:00 Phillips um like e Howard hunt people were involved in the planning the execution people who were present you know Woody haralson's dad was involved in the in the assassination and uh and he confessed multiple times Woody Harrelson's dad was involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy he was not a shooter he what he said his role was was bringing when the shooting started on the grassy from the
• 26:00 - 26:30 grassy null um a a big crowd of people saw the smoke coming up and they ran up to look at it to see what you know what was the source of it and secret servicemen suddenly appeared on the hill and pushed them all down and said you can't come up here the Secret Service leader said they there were no secret service people in that Hill Woody Haroldson Charles haralson's function was to deliver the secret serve as badges to a group of
• 26:30 - 27:00 people on the hill what he says and what a lot of people say who were there that day um is that they knew they did not know it was going to be assassination that they knew there was going to be an incident but they never imagined it would be a murder and a lot of those people then realized that they were part of this you know conspiracy in the death of the president and they kind of scattered a lot of them were subse quently murdered themselves including the key members
• 27:00 - 27:30 Johnny roselli who the day that he was um he was the he was the liazon between the CIA and the Mafia the three Mafia Chiefs the day that he was subed by the house assassination committee he disappeared was found a week later chopped into small pieces in a oil drum in biscane Bay Miami and Sam Jan cono when he was subpoena by tested by the m boss the Chicago outfit boss he was subena to
• 27:30 - 28:00 testify for that committee and he was murdered in his basement by an assassin so there was there's over 30 people who were killed who were you know who were Witnesses or potential Witnesses and then a lot of people have confessed Woody's dad you know was a very very charismatic guy and I'm very close to what and we've talked about this he actually confessed for the first time while he was in a a police shootout
• 28:00 - 28:30 so he was around he was a he was a professional hit man um he had worked for uh the CIA he had been recruited out of the military worked for the CIA and and work for the caros Marcela mob and he died in Maximum Security Prison um for U the murder of a federal judge but you know he was a very very interesting character and he confessed at one time but then he told Woody the story which Woody told me and and also
• 28:30 - 29:00 there's photographs of him at the site that day wow um they if you if you go on Google and put up three say three tramps three tramps uh JFK assassination Dallas his picture will come up okay yep I'm looking at it right now yeah I mean so if it wasn't Lee Harvey oswal working by himself what do you think was the motive behind your uncle getting killed it was people who were um it was a group from
• 29:00 - 29:30 the CIA um who were uh who had been involved in uh Miami um who were angry my uncle felt my uncle committed trees and first of all in the Bay of Pigs by not sending a air cover and then after the Cuban Missile Crisis my uncle had established this very close relationship with with uh kusf and KF who was the head of Russia at the who was the head of Russia and
• 29:30 - 30:00 kusf and he they knew they couldn't trust the people around him and the intelligence apparatus and the military they were both in the same position they were both war heroes who'd seen the bloodiest part of War kusf had been basically was going to be purged by Stalin and he had he had been in Stalingrad which was the worst war that was the worst battle in World War II I mean the worst yeah so and he had been in the middle of he did not ever want to go to war again he didn't want but he
• 30:00 - 30:30 was surrounded by people as was Jack who believed that war was not only inevitable but it was uh it was the sooner the better and so they figured out halfway through you know two years in they figured out they had to start talking to each other individually my uncle installed a hot phone at the White House another one at the cape we which was red we knew if we touch that at Cru would answer we told not to touch that one um and and there's still my my
• 30:30 - 31:00 brother owns that house right now in the wires to that phone are still sticking out of the wall um but uh but Jack also started exchanging these letters with him which were smuggled to him by a Soviet spy called Georgie boloy who was at our house all the time we loved him we knew he was a KGB and Gru spy but he could do he could do rope climbing with it he was a he was a he was like a fire he built like a
• 31:00 - 31:30 fire agent but very powerful he used to do push-up contest with my father he' do rope climbing contest he' knew how to do the CAC dancing and so we loved him but he began smuggling these letters from kusf trusted him my uncle my dad trusted him and he began to smuggle these letters the first one he smuggled in was folded New York Times and they um and uh and they exchanged these very very extraordinary personal letters talking
• 31:30 - 32:00 about how they needed to stay out of war and so um kusf then after the bay after the Cuban Missile Crisis kusf had called Castro to come and spend time with him and Castro spent several months with kusf in Russia and kusf had urged him to make peace with my uncle cash would reached out to my uncle um immediately after that the day that my uncle died Castro was
• 32:00 - 32:30 meeting with his Emissary at verad beach in um in Cuba talking about the format for a to end the embargos which my uncle made it clear to him you I don't care what kind of government you have can be Marxist communist that's not our business we don't want Soviet we we we don't want you to be a Soviet base so all anything so all all Soviet mil milary out and we want you to stop Jay
• 32:30 - 33:00 Gara from going in and making problems with the alliance for Progress countries in Latin America and that's all he wanted and CASRO agreed to that that afternoon he received a call he picked up the call when my my uncle's um Emissary was sitting there and uh and um he he said to him it's over um President Kennedy's been shot so you you know they didn't they knew they my uncle did it behind the
• 33:00 - 33:30 backs of the state department but they knew the CIA knew what was happening and my uncle 30 days before his death on October 22nd 1963 he signed executive order 263 ordering all US troops home from Vietnam so he ended the Vietnam war with the first th000 coming home in December there was only 16,000 troops advisers they weren't allowed to participate in combat he found out they had been and 75
• 33:30 - 34:00 had died and he said that that morning he said no more were done and um he ordered them all home and 30 days after that he was killed so and the Vietnam was a CIA project you know from beginning to end so there were people in the agency and we know who they were you know it was David Aly Phillips it was Bill Harvey it was e Howard hunt it was Allan Dallas it was is um James Jesus Angleton we know the shooters they were
• 34:00 - 34:30 you know three men from uh who were who had been in Batista's battalions in Cuba and who later you know died under different circumstan and one of them died in a prison in Cuba um by you know in prison by Castro but uh you know you asked me what I think I what I what I would say is I'm an attorney I've tried hundreds of cases say I was a district attorney um if I had to uh if I had if I
• 34:30 - 35:00 had to prove my case and the CIA murdered my uncle I'm I'm very confident just on the evidence that is out there now that that would be very very easy to prove um in front of any jurney in America now people shouldn't trust me on this I'm I don't trying to convince anybody people need to do their own research about everything you live in a democracy make up your own mind but you
• 35:00 - 35:30 know one thing my father told me people in Authority lie and you know part of the duty of living in a democracy is to maintain a posture of constant skepticism toward any aggregation of power and you know that's sorry you trusting the experts is not something you do in a democracy that's not a feature of democracy or science it's a feature of religion and totalitarianism you know it's not a thing MH the thing that we were all try to told to do you
• 35:30 - 36:00 need to do your own research and for people who are curious about this the best book that you can read is a book by Jim Douglas called the Unspeakable and he has in a riveting way with poetic writing uh distilled millions of pages of documents and all of these confessions all of the evidence and put it in one really beautifully written story in this book and if you pick it up you you won't be able to put it down but
• 36:00 - 36:30 it's a very it's a brilliant book and it must have it probably has a thousand foot notes in it okay so let's fast forward to 1968 you're 14 years old at the time and you're in boarding school at the Georgetown preparatory school in Maryland your father Bobby Kennedy is running for the presidential nomination with Democrats and during this process on June 5th 1968 he was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he was leaving the ballroom he decided
• 36:30 - 37:00 to go through the kitchen and I guess his bodyguard FBI agent Bill Barry told him to avoid the kitchen because it was very crowded as he was going through shaking hands with everyone a 24-year-old Palestinian man named Saran Saran shot him with a 22 caliber revolver he was hit three times five other people were wounded as well when you found out that your dad had gotten killed what went through your mind well I didn't first of all I would
• 37:00 - 37:30 dispute that description of what happened okay um I don't believe that sir hands bullets ever hit my father okay and neither did the coroner Thomas naguchi who's probably the most famous Corner in American history who did an autopsy that is known as the perfect autopsy he actually flew in the chief Cor ERS of all the mil Branch every branch of the military service to sit in the surgery theater to
• 37:30 - 38:00 watch what he did because he knew what had happen in Dallas and he didn't want to repeat and he he what he found Siran had fired San had eight shots he had 22 revolver or eight shots in it and he fired two shots of my father one of those shots uh hit the first shot hit hit um Paul sh who was the UAW the United Auto Workers uh
• 38:00 - 38:30 deputy chief who would that was there there was only two unions that supported my father the United Auto Workers and Cesar Sha's Union and Paul shade had recruited Cesar Chavez to the United Farm worker so he was very close to my dad he got shot in the head and he was okay and you know he actually died a year and a half ago and spent the last 20 years of life trying to get suran out out of prison the man who shot
• 38:30 - 39:00 him um the other shot went past my father's head and hit a door jam behind him where and it was later removed by the LAPD it was dug out of the door jam the whole door jam was removed he was then pounced upon by six men including rer Johnson who was the 1960 the cathlon champion gold medal Olympian one of my father's closest friends MH and uh Rosie Greer who was one of the you know uh fearsome
• 39:00 - 39:30 forsome who had been a bodyguard for my dad he was you know one of the most famous football players of his time and uh and four other people including the the the guy who was uh uh the director or the consur of the of the Ambassador Hotel and they pounced on him they took his hand and pointed away from my father so they pointed the opposite direction
• 39:30 - 40:00 raver Johnson later told me that he tried to get the gun out of suran's hand but suran had superhuman strength he's a little tiny man I you know I've met him spent 5 foot five I think yeah he's tiny but he couldn't this big you know raer is like 6'4 and solid muscle he could not get the and you had you know you had a you're a professional lineman from you know the open Raiders there that day and they couldn't get it so he
• 40:00 - 40:30 fires six more shots in the opposite direction and empties the Chamber of his gun he's always in front of my father by the way my father he's he he's sitting on with his back to a steam table and they bent him over the steam table and and he fired the bullets this way as you pointed out those bullets each hit people so five people one of them got hit twice M so if you just do the math
• 40:30 - 41:00 my father got shot four times from behind you know and he only hit eight bullets in his gun he didn't reload we know what happened the first two and we know what happened the second six we know what happened to every one of those bullets my father was killed from behind he was shot four times that one of the shots went harmlessly through the shoulder pad of his suit the other three were you know were were fatal or potentially fatal and one
• 41:00 - 41:30 of them was right behind his ear all of them were contact shots um that's what Thomas naguchi found meaning the barrel of the gun was either touching his skin or his clothing and was uh and and left a carbon tattoo or was close enough within an inch close enough to leave a carbon tattoo and um and the the gun was being held at an upward angle so he was shot from behind by somebody who was
• 41:30 - 42:00 standing behind him with a gun press between the two of them and firing and that man was almost certainly Eugene F Cesar who was a security guard who had been hired the day before so they already knew when he got the job he already knew my father was going to be at that hotel his full-time job was at the Lock keep land and and before that he had worked at another fense plant um which was Howard hughes's
• 42:00 - 42:30 company and uh and those and he had a top security classifications at that plant um Lisa peas who's a researcher has has uh has found documents where he self-identifies as a CIA uh agent um he he ended up leaving the country he was very outspoken against my
• 42:30 - 43:00 father he believed that my father uh would start a race war and my father would put blacks in charge of the country and uh and he hated blacks and he ended up leaving the country he died about a year and a half ago in the Philippines before he died I tried to go there and interview him um he originally said that it would cost me $10,000 but he would do it and then when I got close to to going he said it's going to be
• 43:00 - 43:30 15 and then a day before I left he said it's going to be 25,000 so then I I thought he's playing a game yeah and I ended up not going um but uh you know I can't prove that my father was killed um by the CIA um but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence and then you know there's a lot of other circumstantial evidence and particularly with suran's background uh and his trial
• 43:30 - 44:00 there is a lot of uh you know and and the cover up there was a lot of agency involvement Saran San did an interview in 1980 he said that it was a combination of liquor and anger over the anniversary of the 1967 Arab Israeli War that triggered what he did he said that night I went to observe the Jewish Zionist parade in celebration of the June 5th 1967 victory over the Arabs that was a Catalyst that triggered me on that night in addition there was a consumption of liquor and I want the public to understand that so he
• 44:00 - 44:30 felt that it was the Arab Israeli conflict and a whole lot of liquor that kind of caused that but you actually flew down and talked to him in prison at one point right yeah and what did he tell you he said about that night he said the same thing that he's consistently said for you know what 50 years that he has no memory of what happened that night he's still alive today yeah yeah that's what he told you
• 44:30 - 45:00 he just said I don't remember he didn't remember what happened that night he does not believe at this point that he did it okay and and you know what he's always said is they told me they did it that I did it I don't have any memory of doing it but um you know I assume that I did it and he also you know he uh he's a very kind of sweet old man he cried when he talked about the impact of of it on you know he knows he was involved in it
• 45:00 - 45:30 so there's no doubt about that um but he cried when he talked about my mom and you know about seeing all of us when we were growing up without a dad well yeah I mean you lost your uncle a few years before then but now this is your dad yeah how badly did this affect you um I mean you know what is the comparison you know people lose their parents all the time yeah but not under
• 45:30 - 46:00 circumstances like this normally yeah I mean I I'm not saying I'm not trying to argue that it didn't have an impact on me clearly it had an impact on me and on my life and it had an impact on the whole country a dramatic impact I would say on the country um and the direction that we took after his death Nix and getting elected and what happened that Summer with the riots in Chicago um in terms of you know the impact on me
• 46:00 - 46:30 well there's lots of people who lose their parents I feel like I had an advantage over most people because you know my father left a really clear moral milestones for me and he was a he was a heroic figure so it gave me something to live up to it wasn't you know I think it would be much more difficult if I was you know a black kid and wads who's father got you know shot in a gang shootout or something like
• 46:30 - 47:00 that and then you know what's where's your role model so and then I had a big family that came together I had deep religious faith that you know is help helps you through you know any kind of helps you process any kind of Crisis like that or any kind of tragedy and then I had you know I I had uh we just had me isms for doing it I mean we you know we've been through tragedy before and we had I think a very
• 47:00 - 47:30 very loving family my mom at one point said I was asking her when one of my brothers was killed I asked her I said do you think that hole that you leave you know that they leave inside of you when when they die do you think that ever gets better that it ever gets any smaller and she said it doesn't get any smaller what your job is is to grow yourself bigger around the hole you have to take the best parts of
• 47:30 - 48:00 that person's character and integrate it into your own life through discipline through restraint and in doing that we make ourselves bigger and the whole gets proportionally smaller and so you know I was living in a milu where those kind of lessons were part of our daily lives and I think they gave me an advantage in processing that tragedy that you know other people in less enriched environments probably wouldn't
• 48:00 - 48:30 have well after that situation you were expelled from two different boarding schools for using drugs did the drug you start after your dad died one of them was for a lady friend that I had okay was but I'm not saying I wasn't doing drugs at the time but okay it was know yeah I started doing drugs after my dad died okay to try to cope with the loss oh who knows I mean I feel honestly that I
• 48:30 - 49:00 was that I was born an addict and that you know I would have no matter what happened I probably would have uh gone that way but who knows you know you can't there's no way to reconstruct that but I feel feel like a lot of the thing that I had ADHD when I was a kid and that I was I had a big empty hole inside of myself and that you know I couldn't focus I couldn't concentrate in the middle but the minute I started taking drugs I became calm and I was able to
• 49:00 - 49:30 focus and I actually started doing really well in school oh I think I was medicating various issues that I had and um you know and if the medication still worked I'd still be doing it but you know after you know you do it for a while um you know particularly I was using heroin um it turns on you and you know it works for a while it does it's solves all your problems for a little while right and then you know it's like dancing with a gorilla you figure out
• 49:30 - 50:00 that you're not stopping still the gorilla gets tired of it I've never heard that before that's a that's a good comparison that next year your grandfather dies yeah my grandfather had a stroke in 62 oh okay so so he was disabled after that and really never talked again he never had a normal conversation he could only grunt okay so it took you know you had already prepared yourself for that over the course of seven years okay well
• 50:00 - 50:30 um after getting kicked out of a couple of schools you end up getting into Harvard yeah most people who get expelled from schools don't get into Harvard can you explain how you accomplished that I was a top student in my class for the last two years of of school and um you know I had a good academic record that's one reason I'm sure that you know Harvard looked at the fact that my dad
• 50:30 - 51:00 had been a presidential candidate that you know I had generations of Kennedy my my grandfather had been to Harvard uhuh okay um my father had been to Harvard my uncle had been to Harvard and um and so and you know they they they favor leg legacies but you know so I I would say there were a lot of factors and you know and that was and it was a lot easier get to Harvard back then than it is right now yeah okay so
• 51:00 - 51:30 you go to Harvard you graduate with a bachelor's in American history and literature then you go to London School of economics and then you go to Virginia law school where you get your um law degree and then a master's of law from Pace University so you really take the whole school thing very seriously moving forward at one point didn't you have problems uh passing the bar
• 51:30 - 52:00 yeah I failed the bar by one point okay I got 659 out of 660 but they didn't say that in the newspaper articles they just said idiot flunks SP it's it's it's anyway that's one of the the downsides of celebrity and by the way mhm I was a heroin to that point well right because in 1983 when you were 29 years old you were charged with Heroin
• 52:00 - 52:30 possession yeah was that a turning point because now it's out in the public Kennedy and yeah I mean one of the thing one of the problems I had that was you know there would be because of the you know the strictures that I'd grown up in that you know any anything bad you tell anything bad it's going to you tell anybody any secrets about yourself it's
• 52:30 - 53:00 going to get in thead breath so me the idea of going into a 12-step meeting and start telling being truthful to people was I I I I just as soon go you know swim to the bottom of the ocean and you know try to breathe I I just didn't do it so um but all of a sudden everybody knew I was drug addict and it gave me the freedom to actually get help and you know I immediately
• 53:00 - 53:30 uh I'd say I immediately had a a spiritual reignment because I was able to go in and be honest for the first time in my life it wasn't yeah it wasn't just not having to do drugs but it was not having to lie anymore and to hide things that I could just be you know who I was and be honest well right you got two years probation and community service and you went into a drug treatment center like you mentioned was that the point that you kick drugs
• 53:30 - 54:00 yeah a lot of people try to kick though you know and they come back they you know they come back to it situations happen what do you think was the secret to you actually kicking drugs so long ago and not going back I because I I you know I came into the 12 step program and I gave up control you know I didn't you they they say in you know 12 set programs they say half measures Avail us nothing which seems unfair because half measures should Avail us half right
• 54:00 - 54:30 right but they if you don't do the if you don't completely commit to it it uh uh if you commit 100% it's guaranteed to work and I committed 100% I said you know whatever I need to do to get sober I'm going to do and I was so done with being I didn't like it you know for 14 years I've been trying to quit oh I started uh I started doing you know shooting arrow when when I was 15 years
• 54:30 - 55:00 old and um I uh and I but I always was trying to quit it was I was always doing it without my own permission you know I was always doing it uh um you know again I was I knew I was living against conscience I knew that this is not what I wanted to do with my life and I the weird thing is I had iron willpower and every other area of my life like I gave up candy for Lent when I was 14 and I never ate Candy again till I was in
• 55:00 - 55:30 college I gave up desserts about the same time and I never ate a dessert again until I was a freshman in college I was playing sports I was playing rugby and I I was trying to bulk up and I started eating desserts again but I felt like I could do anything with my willpower but this compulsion was impervious to will I would tell myself at 9:00 in the morning I'm never going to do that again and at 4:00 in the afternoon I'd be doing it and you know I it would the most to me
• 55:30 - 56:00 the most demoralizing feature of addiction of the disease was my incapacity to keep contract with myself you know I um I was baffled and completely demoralized by it so when I finally got the opportunity that to be sober I just said I you know whatever I need to do to make this work I'm gonna do and I did that's what I did and my my desire for drugs and alcohol was just lifted and it was like it was as if I
• 56:00 - 56:30 had never been a drug addict it was you know it was a miracle it was like it was big a miracle to me as if I'd been suddenly able to walk on water congratulations heroin is one of the worst drugs from everyone I've talked to and that's the hardest one to kick so congrats on actually kicking it for that long yeah I mean I'd rather be addict to heroin than crack cocaine if you if we want to get into the we fair enough okay so you sobered up you pass the bar and that's when you started your whole environmental enforcement lawsuit
• 56:30 - 57:00 and you know what basically carried you on for many decades yeah what really was the motivation to really go after people that were ruining the environment well you know I always uh I first of all I was always an outdoors person and that you know my father raised us and we were doing Whitewater kaying on the biggest you know rivers in the country from when we were were really young and this was a time when people you know normal people were not doing White Water it was before it
• 57:00 - 57:30 became kind of you know something that people do on weekends it was a commitment and you know I was fishing from when I was a little kid and I was training Hawks from when I was 9 years old and hunting with them and uh and so I was like in the woods all the time and I this is where I felt the one place I felt calm and I when I was a kid they you know the Eisenhower's Highway program was kicking off and they built a highway right next to my house they
• 57:30 - 58:00 built it through the pond where I was fish catching frogs and fishing and you know they just plowed over and I was like this is like theft they just you know they just ruined this place they stole it from the public you know we it was uh and and that's how I you know I that's how I viewed environmental injury I I I viewed it as a theft a theft of the common a privatization of the commons of the
• 58:00 - 58:30 things that you know we're all supposed to share like air water Wildlife Fisheries public lands the law says and this ancient law it goes back to the code of jinian these assets that by their nature are you know the assets of the entire community that you can't privatize are not susceptible to private property ownership air water Wildlife Fisheries public lands aquifers National Force all these they belong to the people everybody has a right to use them nobody can use them in a way that will diminish or injure
• 58:30 - 59:00 their use and enjoyment by others under the code of Justinian which was the law the first kind of effort to to at constitutional government if you were a citizen of Rome you whether you were rich or poor humble or Noble you know African or or european you had an absolute right to cross a beach throw in a net and take out your share of the fish the emperor themselves couldn't stop you and that was just one of the rights of living in a republic and what you see is that when
• 59:00 - 59:30 democracy and Republic declines their powerful entities within Society will immediately move to privatize the public trust and that's what pollution is it's a way of private I mean General Electric the constitution of the state of New York says that all the fish and H and River belong to the people of New York every kid in New York every you know black kid in orlem has a absolute right to to throw in a plug and pull out a stripe bass and bring it home and feed
• 59:30 - 60:00 it to their family but they can't do that anymore because General Electric privatized every fish in the river by dumping pcbs into them so they're now too dangerous to eat so they you know they in order to to avoid one of the costs of bringing their product to Market they dump their waste into the Hudson and they privatize every fish in the river and that's what all pollution is somebody privatizing the air that my children you know I had four kids with asthma on bad air days um they got
• 60:00 - 60:30 attacks so there the air was being privatized stolen from them and that's how I always looked at it I and I uh um you know I went to work for commercial fishermen on the Hudson River and recreational fishermen and figured out new ways to start suing polluters and you know we built this organization called River Keeper um into you know we help restore the river and say the Hudson is an
• 60:30 - 61:00 international um model for ecosystem protection it's the richest waterway in the North Atlantic it produces uh more pounds of fish per acre more biomass per gallon than any other waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north the Equator is the last river system left in the North Atlantic that still has strong spawning stocks of all of its historical species of migratory fish and the miraculous resurrection of the Hudson has inspired the creation of rivere Keepers and water Keepers all over we have one here on Santa Monica
• 61:00 - 61:30 Bay we have each one has a patrol boat we have 350 organizations each one has a patrol boat they each have a full-time paid water keeper and they sue polluters and uh and enforce the law because it's illegal to pollute but the law doesn't get enforced so that's what we do and we're now the biggest water protection group in the world well you said the poor communities get most of the burden of environmental pollution you said polluters always choose the
• 61:30 - 62:00 soft target of poverty and you've also said that Chicago southside has the highest concentration of toxic waste dumps in America yeah uncontrolled toxic waste that you know that's the my first case was representing NAACP um of ausing against the city of ausing which was trying to put a waste Transfer Facility in the oldest bad black neighborhood with nson Valley and when I started fighting that case I started looking around and saying oh
• 62:00 - 62:30 this is what always happens you know four out of every five toxic waste stumps in America is in a black neighborhood the highest concentration of toxic waste stumps um is in in you know in the country is Southside Chicago the biggest waste stump in our country is a Alabama which is 85% black the most contaminated ZIP code here in California is East LA and you go you know you can go on and on with that you know and
• 62:30 - 63:00 probably the biggest you know problem in in the black community is uh you know chronic disease and and toxins that are poisoning this generation of kids you know including 44% of of black children in urban areas have dangerous levels of blood in their blood um they're getting Mercury toxicity it lowers IQ and it it uh destroys your executive function Your Capacity to regulate your own behavior um you know a lot of these
• 63:00 - 63:30 toxins uh make kids ADD and ADHD and they have a lot other damaging impacts well in 1994 you married Mary Kathleen Richardson you guys had four kids together in 2010 you guys got divorced in 2012 she ended up committing suicide according to reports it said that she had found a personal Journal of yours where you had written down various encounters sexual encounters with 37
• 63:30 - 64:00 different women and that possibly triggered her to take her own life would you care to comment on that at all yeah um so you know it's hard first of all I'm sorry for your loss by the way this is your mother your kid's mother yeah I mean I um you know I was not divorced at the time by the way I filed for divorce in 2012 but um you know Mary was having a hard time and I actually in 2014 when
• 64:00 - 64:30 she took her own life I I found her and you know and cut her down she had hanged herself in you actually found her like that yeah wow um but and you know it was a heartbreaking and you know I had a lot of my children at that time were very vulnerable and they had been through five years of very very difficult um times and Mary was in amazing woman um and she was a very very good mother to them um but her uh her mental condition
• 64:30 - 65:00 began deteriorating um at uh you know in those last years and they those kids experienced a lot of that and you know all of those kids I think were at risk at that time they've all turned into an amazing amazing kids they're all on they dwell in school and colleges they have wonderful friendships they have wonderful relationships and they um you know they've excelled in their lives which is a miracle and I'm very grateful
• 65:00 - 65:30 to um my wife Cheryl who became a mother to them um just so that you know I would say this in all cases that um people uh who are healthy and have you know have um a strong uh who are strong emotionally no matter what other people do to them or what other people's behaviors they don't take
• 65:30 - 66:00 their own lives um and I'm sure many of things that I did uh hurt Mary in different ways people take their lives for complex reasons and because of mental illness um so and and you know one of I in in the program I'm in the Journal that you're talking about was called is called your fifth step oh so was part of the drug treatment Journal it was part
• 66:00 - 66:30 of my uh it was part of my you know my recovery and I I was wondering why someone would write this down well I didn't write it also was there weren't like names of people and all of those they you know in the way that the newspapers reported that to make it look like uh you know it was keeping a you know kind of a you know notches on the trigger that's not what it was it was my own um you know way of of trying to live
• 66:30 - 67:00 an examine life and struggling with an issue that I was struggling with at that time and I kept that fifth step in a safe and somehow in her in the place that where she was he put a lot of effort into getting that safe open and then handing that to her sisters with instruction that if anything happened to her it should be published in the press and then shortly
• 67:00 - 67:30 after that she took her own life oh I you know it's a tragedy for you know listen I take responsibility for my own conduct um and uh but you know it was part of a long history of of um you know of difficulty yeah and for a lot of people well in 1995 you developed Ved as spasmodic dysphonia yeah which is why your voice sounds the way it does right
• 67:30 - 68:00 now you had an operation for this at one point right I went about I don't know about a year ago I went to not even a year I'd say seven months ago I went to Japan to Kyoto to get a a a surgery procedure that they develop there and that is not available here in the United States and it basically is my you know my brain it's a neurological injury so my brain is telling my vocal cords to tighten
• 68:00 - 68:30 up and they were so tight that they were touching each other and no air could get through so a lot of times I'd go to speak and nothing would come out and I never knew when I went to speak what was going to happen and um that S I went over there the surgery was you know they do the surgery on you when you're awake and what they do is they put a titanium bridge between your vocal cour to keep them separate okay so that air can pass through and they do it you know when you're awake and you actually try on a
• 68:30 - 69:00 whole bunch of different voices so Cheryl was in the room with me when we didn't it until the the blood made her leave the room but she was listening to the voices with me and and uh kind of selecting which one they uh cuz some of them they your voice actually Smooths out when it's a higher pitch but then you know you high pitch voice yeah yeah then you have a high pitch voice anyway you know I also it and I think that really helped me a lot and I I came
• 69:00 - 69:30 home I did a lot I've done a lot of functional medicine stuff and I've worked with a chiropractor and I've worked with a lot of other um uh people uh and I think my my voice now is getting better and better and I think part of it was the surgery but also part of it is the therapies that I'm doing now well in 1996 you actually met with Fidel Castro and you went out to Cuba to meet with him there yeah I met with him
• 69:30 - 70:00 on other occasions as well okay and I guess you guys spent a long time talking and he said that he thinks the world would have been a better place had your your father and your uncle lived because like you had mentioned earlier there was talks about a better situation with Cuba I mean the Embargo is it is it even lifted didn't Obama lift the Bargo or it's it's there's some of it is lifted but it's still um you know some you can't freely
• 70:00 - 70:30 travel to Cuba completely the way you could travel to like Canada or Mexico I don't know what you can do now when I went there you needed a special permission if you wanted to go legally you needed to go to have a special permission from the US government and I went legally a lot of other people would go by going down to the Dominican Republic or Mexico and they can immigrate then and would cooperate by not stamping your passport what was Castro like in person he was incredibly Charming in fact I went with
• 70:30 - 71:00 Cheryl and we spent a day with him and my kids um you know I don't know about two years before he died and uh he was very very kind to me and to my family and um you know he had very open engaged mind and he I talked to him about a million things I talked to him about the assassinations I talked to him about you know the US attempts to assassinate him I talked to him about he was a really big scuba
• 71:00 - 71:30 diver and I took my whole family there and spent 10 day he preserved an area uh called uh Gardens of the Queen south of Cuba that's one of the biggest preserved ocean areas in the world and it's probably the best coral reef it's argu I I mean it's it's probably in the Atlantic at least it's the best coral reef because it's it's like going going diving in the 19 50s which I did I started diving when I was six years old and I've seen you know the
• 71:30 - 72:00 deterioration of the reefs all around the world and um you go there and it's like going back the 1950s because he preserved he was very very close to Shak kusto and um Shak kusto had talked him into taking this step of of preserving it making it so there's uh you know there there's no fishing in there there there there's a very very limited entry and you know we went on Cheryl and I and the kids went on a Cuban boat that
• 72:00 - 72:30 went out there for 10 days you sleep on the boat and you dive two or three times a day and before we went we spent a day with Castro and you know he told us about all of his diving Adventures um he also talked my kids were very interested in the history of Cuba and he talked about Batista and uh talked about um you know my my kids asked him my son Aiden he wrote letters to my kids all my kids afterwards very
• 72:30 - 73:00 lengthy lengthy letters and sent us all pictures that one of his sons had taken there we asked him um my son Aiden asked him how did you decide you know he had come across from from Mexico on a yacht it was a big cabin cruiser I think it was like 52 ft along called the grandma and it was leaky it was an old kind of you know looked like uh the African queen you know was kind
• 73:00 - 73:30 of a smoking a Hulk of of a ship and he'd come across from Mexico to get up to the SE MRE and they had brought 63 men with them there were a lot of revolutionaries in Cuba at that time and they were different ilks some of them were marxists some of them were Democratic my son asked him how did you choose which um which uh men to bring we did you just try to bring the ones who were hardcore marxists and he said no we
• 73:30 - 74:00 just brought the smallest one because that's how we fit everybody on and Castro himself is huge you know he's like six foot I don't know three or and very uh you know uh you know he's he's kind of a formidable guy um so uh anyway I I talked to him about that I talked to him on when the first time I went down there I was trying to talk him into stop holding construction on a nuclear power
• 74:00 - 74:30 plant and we were showing technology to him about burning the B gas which is the waste product of the sugar Mills and how he could which is just burned openly in Cuba because they have to get rid of all the cane after they squeeze the sugar out of it and what we showed him is that he could use that there there was these new European turbines that have been invented that can could could burn the B gas and generate the same amount ultimately of power that he was at that
• 74:30 - 75:00 point getting from was anticipated to get from the nuclear power plant and he wouldn't have to it was the same plant that uh was the was was the Chernobyl design oh okay we were asking him not to build it yeah and ultimately he aled construction well in 1999 John F Kennedy Jr dies in a small plane crash were you close to him at all very close in fact I was waiting for him I was having I was supposed to have dinner with him that night oh my god really yeah I was
• 75:00 - 75:30 waiting for him at his house in the cap for him and Carolyn and it got later and later and then I uh I just started having a bad feeling you know that night and um it was one of those things when you know you know that it's uh that it's a bad news and um yeah we were very very close sorry for your loss um you know because of that
• 75:30 - 76:00 along with your father and your uncle people started to coin at the the Kennedy curse does that bother you when you hear that it doesn't bother me I mean I don't you know I don't put any stock in it I you know I it's not something that I I tell people don't talk about the Kennedy CSE I mean a lot of people in my family have died young yeah um you know
• 76:00 - 76:30 my uncle said about my my cousin John uh he said he had every gift except for gray hair that God gave him every gift but gray hair and I think that can be said true of a lot of members of my family yeah well in 2000 you endorsed vice president Al Gore for his presidential campaign were you surprised that he didn't win um yes I was surpris and I you know I wrote an article actually an award-winning article for Rolling Stone uh uh raising doubts about the
• 76:30 - 77:00 legitimacy of that election um because of the voting voter suppression of voting fraud that took place in six Ohio counties right I mean when you compare to what happened with Donald Trump do you think that there was election interference or do you think that Trump you know I don't I really don't know I mean my suspicion is that there was no that that that the election results are
• 77:00 - 77:30 are legitimate that's my Prejudice but I you know I I really don't I wouldn't make that assertion without having really looked into it and it's not something that I've looked into what I don't think is right I I don't think it's a threat to democracy for people to say the election was fixed I mean we said it in 2001 it was fixed you know Bush Gore and um oh sorry Bush Gore was 2001 I it was Carrie who you know in 2004
• 77:30 - 78:00 that I won the you know that I wrote that article about right so I thought the election was fixed in 2004 that it was you know we got the wrong result I think that everybody agrees that 2001 was you know was fixed and so I you know from I don't think I think the election systems are broken we need to change the way that we can't rely just on machines we need
• 78:00 - 78:30 paper ballots um and then there's other changes that we ought to make I mean we listen we have a whole city called Las Vegas that was built on you know the capacity of machines to count right and not make mistakes right um and and there's ATMs on every corner in every city in this country that never give you too much money so we know how to make a a machine that can count right and it's our election system we're supposed to be the world's exemplary democracy right so
• 78:30 - 79:00 number one we should be able to we should have machines that everybody has faith in that can't be hacked you know and I don't you could probably hack an ATM I don't know but you know you don't hear about it a lot so somehow those machines are built you know I mean they wouldn't be there if they were easy to hack right the banks wouldn't keep them there we must be able to build a machine that can't be acted and we also ought to have
• 79:00 - 79:30 the Safeguard of having paper ballots at every voting booth and then you know I I have a you know one of the things that I'm going to do as president is I'm going to make passport cards available to every American who needs them who can't afford them for free that will allow us to demand ID at the voting booth which Democrats don't like you know laws that require voter ID because a lot of their constituents don't have driver's license you know
• 79:30 - 80:00 blacks in the cities a lot of particularly young black people do not have driver's license because they don't need them there's elderly people all over the country who who who have expired driver's license and so they don't get a new one and there are a lot of students in the country and young people who don't have their licenses so Democrats don't like laws that say you need a driver's license or you need a a picture ID to get you know to to vote
• 80:00 - 80:30 because they think that that's going to disenfranchise their principal constituents Republicans in turn of anxiety that there's cheating going on there's voter fraud and there's an easy way to settle it to to solve this repot for everybody which is right now it costs 65 bucks to get a federally issued photo ID which is a passport card just a card it's not the book it's the card what I'm going to do is I'm going
• 80:30 - 81:00 to wave that fee that's a barrier to a lot of people um I'm going to wave that fee so that anybody can go to any local post office and with proof of citizenship and get that ID what does that do here's what it does number one it it gets the the the the cons the Democratic powerhouses I mean Andrew Young already agreed this the civil rights leaders uh Al Sharpton and others have said if if we do that they will
• 81:00 - 81:30 drop their objections to the to a requirement of photo ID at the voting po so you solve all those problems those anxieties between Republican those friction between Democrats and Republicans number two if you don't have a voter ID in this country you're a second class citizen you can't get a bank account you can't open a bank account wow okay you can't that means if you get yourself social security check a lot of Americans are living like this you get your Social Security check or your paycheck you have to go to a Check Casher and that guy's taking 10% exactly
• 81:30 - 82:00 oh you know it's already poor hard to be poor and it just everything makes it harder you can't get on an airplane you can't get a hotel room you can't uh you can't visit your child at school without a government issued photo ID yeah so your life is terrible right more terrible than than it than it already is then being poor already makes it the other thing it does is by giving getting these photo IDs to everybody is it stops
• 82:00 - 82:30 the immigration price of the Border because right now if you're an employer let's say you're a construction firm in New York and you want to hire illegal aliens it's IL it's illegal for you to do that but all you have to ask for is a social security card and then you check the box and that's all the government demands of you social security card has no photo on it it's easy to fabricate they passed from hand to hand it's made out of paper yeah
• 82:30 - 83:00 and then they they give the guy you know they're uh they're paying the guy you know $7 $8 12 bucks an hour on a construction site that firm these unscrupulous firms who are knowingly doing this because they know they can get away with it are now bidding for contracts against Union shops so there's you know they're screwing everybody well if you just say you can't get a job in this country unless you show a governmen issued photo ID of passport C
• 83:00 - 83:30 and we make sure everybody's got one who's legal what it means is nobody comes across that border again because everybody is coming across because they want a job if they know they cannot get a job in the United States of America without that card they're going to stop coming and that solves the problem overnight I love it you're a partner with Vantage Point Capital Partners I was they they're oh goone okay well but at the time it was one of the world's largest clean tech Venture Capital firms and you guys were the largest preo
• 83:30 - 84:00 investor in Tesla yes okay I've owned four Teslas it's by far my favorite car you're welcome well thank you great car I have a model X plaid now is the best car I've ever own my son just B you bought a used one what do you think of that idea I bought a used one at one point you did that's cool I knew one better cuz you can't get a warranty and I thought if that battery does yeah well I had I I bought it directly from Tesla which had the extended warranty oh at the time but now I have a new one by far
• 84:00 - 84:30 the best cars ever according to the internet you have a net worth of $15 million is that more or less accurate I don't know uh I didn't get any of that Tesla money no why didn't you get the Tesla money well you know actually the guy who was running my who was running van Point um was uh got in a very bad fight with uh Elon he this guy was a very
• 84:30 - 85:00 acerbic uh Silicon Valley venture capital he's one of these you know uh sort of alpha male you know double X testoserone guys who is uh who got in a bad fight with with um with Elon and Elon actually writes a lot of I think I would describe as vitriolic uh description of his relationship with his
• 85:00 - 85:30 guy they didn't like each other and Vantage Point bailed out of Tesla very early and I think they only got they sold out uh all of their state to Mercedes-Benz and I think they only got maybe four or five x whereas if they'd hold on to that state they'd have Aid 5,000 x oh yeah I kicked myself for not buying Tesla stock back in 2015 when I bought my first Tesla I I own stock now but I wish I bought back then you a pre-ipo oh my God yeah but my um my uh
• 85:30 - 86:00 my deal with Vantage Point would only applied to companies that I was involved in so I you know I wouldn't have gotten I wouldn't have gotten a a piece of that test a sake anyway and you know so I I don't know what my net worth is probably a little but I don't know got it okay so let's lead into why you're here today in a speech in New Hampshire you said you were considering running for president
• 86:00 - 86:30 and you said I'm thinking of was thinking about it I've passed the biggest hurdle which is my wife as green LED now originally well you wanted to be a candidate for the Democratic nomination now I looked it up the last time an incumbent president wasn't elected by their party was Franklin Pierce in 1856 that wait that was that was what that wasn't El by their party yeah meaning that what do you mean meaning that an incumbent president that was about to run for the second term the the Democratic party didn't want them to run
• 86:30 - 87:00 again so what I'm saying is that when you have a president that's done a first term they're almost always you know nominated by the party to do the second term so why did you originally want to run for Democratic president well I mean first of all I'm a Democrat I was born a Democrat my family is the iconic you know right family in the Democratic party which would you probably would have ran after Biden's second term if you had a second term yeah but I I wasn't sitting around looking to run for president I you know I didn't ever intend to run for president I ran for president because what I saw happening
• 87:00 - 87:30 in in this country and particularly Democratic party I felt like I was in a unique position to um to to save the country from what's Happening I mean you know the Ukraine war it was one of the issues the censorship that I saw going on uh the government orchestrated censorship of individuals who criticizing government policy never happened before in our country and
• 87:30 - 88:00 orchestrated by the Democratic party and uh and then the um you know this corrupt merger of state and corporate power which is strip mining the middle class in this country of its wealth of its Equity um destroying black communities there's going to be no equity in Black communities within uh by 2030 and uh and just destroying quality of life in in our country in all communities the Rust Belt the farm belt you know our urban areas and this
• 88:00 - 88:30 disintegration and I felt like because I've been on the Forefront for so many years of addressing the fighting the issue of corporate uh capture of our regulatory agencies that I was in a in a really good position to unravel it and that you know a lot of the my history with Democratic Values uh put me in a position where I really felt like I had to speak out on it well on October 9th of this year you announced you running
• 88:30 - 89:00 as a independent which makes you the fifth member of your family to seek presidency of the United States now as an independent is sort of a you know different situation the last person I felt that ran as independent and made some sort of progress was Ross perau and Ross perau what he essentially did was he split the Republican vote and like George HW Bush blamed him for not getting a second term you never have seen an independent actually win the
• 89:00 - 89:30 presidency so is your goal to win the presidency or is it to gain a certain amount of power based on your vote and do certain deals that will help some of the causes that you're looking to it's to win the presidency okay so you're trying to win the presidency yeah okay how realistic do you think that is I I think it's realistic I mean I you know Rosboro was winning he was beating um both Bush and um and Gore he had 39% of the what
• 89:30 - 90:00 was it Clinton I think no no Bush and G right no was it Bush and Clinton Bush and Clinton yeah what year was it was 2 or was 96 he ran for Independence in ' 92 yeah okay so '92 yeah he was 96 I believe he got up to 39% yeah a lot he was beating both of them yeah so he was leading and then there were threats against his daughter and he withdrew and then when
• 90:00 - 90:30 he got back in he never was able to recover so it's quite possible that if he had stayed in that he would have won um but also today you know at that point I think there was only 20% of Americans were registered in bance that a more than 50% or I somewhere around 50% are wait 50% are registered independent it's either it's between 40 and 50% so it's the biggest party today okay well your family spoke about
• 90:30 - 91:00 you running there was a signed statement by four of your siblings he you know how many how many people I have in my family a lot 105 105 so four four people from your family Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townson former representative Joseph Kennedy II Rory Kennedy and Carrie Kennedy they said the decision of our brother Bobby to run as a third party candidate against Joe Biden is dangerous to our country Bobby might share the same name as our father but he does not share the same values Vision or judgment today's announcement is deeply saddening for us we denounce his candidacy and believe it to be
• 91:00 - 91:30 perilous for our country when you hear that from your siblings what do you think you know what I'm okay with it I you know I was raised in a family where we we argue with each other my father encouraged us to argue and debate every night um in fact you know they they orchestrated debates the same way my grandfather did with them so you know there's a lot of things I disagree with my family on I we were on different sides on the during the Obama when Obama ran I was on one side they were on the
• 91:30 - 92:00 other and there's a lot of issues that I don't agree with any of those people on the war know I don't agree with them on censorship I have five members of my family who are working for the administration I have President Biden has a bust of my father behind him in the Oval Office you know my family has a long long relationship with him and you know I'm sure you know those four particular people are horrified and I'm running against
• 92:00 - 92:30 somebody who they consider a friend well you know I'm able to love people with who I with whom I disagree and you know I so I'm I'm okay with them doing you know whatever they whatever expressing themselves um but I don't think it affects my candidacy at all well you've said one of your platforms is that the American government is dominated by corporate power you said the Environmental Protection Agency was run by the oil
• 92:30 - 93:00 industry the coal industry and the pesticide industry and the Food and Drug Administration is overly dominated by big Pharma a big farmer and also you know the uh industrialized food processors you know um and big a as well what's going to be the first thing you do if you get elect the president the the first thing I do yes like the first day yeah the first day uh the first day I'm going to I'm going to free Julian Assange I'm going to free Edward
• 93:00 - 93:30 Snowden I'm gonna pardon them okay I'm gonna issue an executive order for biding any federal employee from collaborating with social media media sites to censor political speech in this country um I'm going to I'm going to issue an order that passport cards are going to be now available at 33,000 post offices around the country for anybody who needs them I'm going to go down to Bethesda to
• 93:30 - 94:00 NIH headquarters and I'm going to speak with the employees sometime in that first week and say that you know we're now going to focus on chronic disease and we're going to have good science and we're going to open up the databases to the public and we're going to cure chronic disease we're going to end the chronic disease pandemic in this country and then you know in the first 90 days I'm going to start the process of winding down the Empire abroad and bringing you know closing I'm going to do a base closure
• 94:00 - 94:30 commission 800 bases we've got abroad I'm going to figure out which ones we can close and how we can cut our military budget from $900 billion a year to $500 billion a year um I can go on well Robert F Kennedy Jr I appreciate you coming in and doing this interview and I'll be honest a few months ago in an interview when I interviewed math haa I said that I wouldn't do an interview with you you interviewed Robert F Kennedy yes I did that was one that I
• 94:30 - 95:00 wouldn't do why because of all the conspiracy theory [ __ ] um he if you watched the interview I didn't watch the interview we didn't really we didn't really dive into any conspiracy the that's his thing yeah uh Co is fake and because of some of your stances about covid which I disagree with but ultimately when I looked into your story and I saw the good that you did in terms of your environmental work and everything else like that I I realized need to get off my high horse except that people will have different opinions
• 95:00 - 95:30 than me on certain things and that doesn't mean that they don't deserve a platform and don't deserve a place to speak on Vlad TV and uh what you've done over the course of your life has been phenomenal I think that uh you know the amount of companies that you've sued that that was dumping toxins in our environment and everything else like that is uh you know something they don't speak about enough you know when when they talk about your name they focus on more the you know the gossip and everything else like that but they don't
• 95:30 - 96:00 talk about all the good work that you did so um you know congratulations on your journey and um you know I'm looking forward to see how this race develops thank you and let me say something to you you know on Co I would bet that if you and I actually spent time talking about it that you'd find that you probably agree with me on almost everything that I um you know that I that I feel about Co um I think a lot of people who disagree with me about the how we handled Co pandemic are people
• 96:00 - 96:30 who were reading mainstream media reports about what I said rather than actually looking at statements that I made oh you know that's part of the problem is that a lot of what I've said has been distorted and mischaracterized of people believe I'm anax and that you know um a lot of other things about me aren't true oh anyway maybe we can talk about that one day absolutely and find some common ground yeah I mean we're all going to have disagreements no one's going to sit down
• 96:30 - 97:00 with me and have the exact same views that I do so I respect the views that you have and uh hopefully likewise but thank you so much for sharing your views and thank you so much for just telling your story because your family is so legendary and will always be legendary and um you know it's really an honor to sit down with you and talk the way we did today it's an honor to be with you to absolutely peace